The current city council has emphasized improvements to transit and pushed for more active transportation infrastructure. What is your position on the planned Bus Rapid Transit-style system and efforts to make getting around easier for pedestrians and cyclists? (question posed by Alex MacPherson of the StarPhoenix to all mayoral candidates)
My view is that this bus rapid transit system has its future hopes pinned on a few variables that are not yet distinguished. The principal key component to that is the location of the new arena. Creating a new arena and having BRT access many blocks away would be a large detriment to the success of such a project. And we can’t establish a reasonable location for an arena without also looking at the negative effects of rail traffic in our city. The library is also tied to the BRT, and its success will also be directly linked to it. The one wildcard that has yet to be fully discussed is the downtown bus terminal. I think that a bus rapid transit system for our city is premature. To expect that replacing one type of bus transportation for another type at great expense is going to make a landmark difference is naïve. Currently, our bus transportation costs the city more than $25 million a year beyond what it makes. It is a required social service not likely ever to be a money-making operation. What I would like to see is that we do our best to improve the service we currently have to start. A project that can be independent of a greater BRT system could also be integrated later into a new bus system. In that improvement is predictive modelling.
I talked years ago to the Dean of Computational Science at the University of Saskatchewan about running a grad student program to create a system which would help city transit predictive model bus transportation dynamically. There are few moving parts, and we could create our own homegrown solution at a reasonably low cost. Our own people would get that up and running, which would help better predict ridership along our bus transit routes and would also help the system establish better trending across all the ridership. While it wouldn’t know who individual patrons are, it would have a sense that a rider gets on a bus at a bus stop every day at a certain time and then follows through the system until they depart at another location across the city, even across multiple bus routes. We need to increase the efficiency of our current system and try to get our ridership somewhere close to the targets that are already set but not met. Once we have a more efficient system for higher ridership satisfaction, then other variables, such as the proposed arena location, might be known. Regarding bike lanes, my main stance on bike lanes is that I do not want them to coexist with heavy traffic. I believe there are too many circumstances in the city currently that are dangerous for both bicyclists and vehicle operators. Bicycles were not designed to coexist with heavy vehicles, so we need to start taking steps to provide their own travel ways around the city, which give them their own safety and access. People are fairly adamant that they do not want bicycles riding down their sidewalks where walking traffic is present, and it is basically the same circumstance for vehicles and bicycles on heavy roads. And when I mean heavy roads, I mean roads like Idylwyld Drive, 8th Street, 33rd Street and such.